What website support covers, and what it never does

What actually gets done in a year

On the sites we maintain, the annual work is almost always these six items:

• Updating core, plugins and theme, with a check after each round. The important part is not the update but looking at the site afterwards.
• Automatic backups stored off the same server, plus at least one test restore a year.
• Uptime monitoring, so you learn the site is down before your customer does.
• Handling external changes that carry dates: PHP versions, SSL expiry, domain expiry, payment gateway rule changes.
• Periodic cleanup of the database and orphaned files, which quietly cost speed over time.
• Small content edits the owner does not have the time or patience to make.

Added together on an ordinary corporate site, that is a few hours a month. Anyone charging a large figure for exactly this list is selling standby, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as they say so.

What support is not, and what people expect anyway

This is the boundary, and it is where nearly every dispute starts. These are usually outside the contract:

• Building a new page or a new section. That is development.
• SEO. Support keeps the site alive; ranking is a different job with a different input and output.
• Writing content and producing photography.
• Redesigning the look.
• Third party service fees. Domain and hosting renewals cost money even when your provider handles the paperwork.

Ask for that list to appear in the contract in exactly those words. "Full website support" specifies nothing, and on the day there is a disagreement it will be read in favour of whoever wrote it.

The three levels that actually exist

The market gives packages whatever names it likes, but in practice three different things are being sold. Technical maintenance covers updates, backups, monitoring and security with no content changes; it is the cheapest and it is enough for most corporate sites. Maintenance plus hours adds a capped number of hours per month for small edits, and unused hours usually do not roll over, which is worth asking before you sign. Shop support is genuinely different, because an hour of downtime is a lost order and the payment path has more parts that can fail.

Now the part we are not supposed to write. We sell support too, and we still say this: if your site is five informational pages that change once a year, is not a shop, holds no sensitive forms and gets little traffic from Google, a monthly contract probably does not pay for itself.

In that case buy three things and let the rest go: automatic updates switched on, automatic backups to external storage, and one annual review. It costs a fraction of a retainer and covers ninety per cent of the risk.

The reverse is also true. Three situations where the absence of support costs more than the support would: an active shop, a site whose downtime directly stops sales leads, and a site running custom code that nobody but its builder understands.

Questions to ask before signing

All five have short answers, and evasion is itself the answer:

• What is the response time, and during which hours? "Available 24 hours" with no defined response time means nothing.
• Where are the backups stored, and if I leave tomorrow, how do I receive them?
• Whose name is on the site admin, the hosting and the domain?
• Do you send a monthly report, and what is in it?
• If the site is hacked, is the clean up inside the contract or billed separately?

The third matters most and is asked least. The domain and hosting should be in your name even when somebody else administers them. Otherwise the day you want to leave is the day you discover the site is not yours to move. If you are already in that position, moving a WordPress site to new hosting shows that the migration is not the hard part. Getting the credentials is.

Either way, the decision is easier once you can see the current state of the site rather than guessing at it.

How to tell whether your current support works

Check three things today. The date of the last successful backup. The current version of WordPress and the plugins. And the domain expiry date. If you do not know one of them and your provider does not answer immediately, you do not really have support.

For comparison, our own position on this site: WordPress 7.0.4 with automatic core updates enabled, and PHP 8.5.2, which has security support until the end of 2029. Neither is an achievement. It only shows that answering those three questions should take seconds.

If your site sits on hosting that still offers old PHP versions, the problem is not your support provider and current hosting solves it. If it is also slow, speed optimisation is a separate one time job rather than maintenance. And if you conclude the current site is not worth maintaining, building a new one sometimes comes out cheaper than perpetual repair.

Common questions

How much does website support cost?

It depends on hours and on the level of commitment, not on the number of pages. Before comparing prices, put the task lists side by side; two packages at the same price can be two entirely different jobs.

Does support include SEO?

Usually not, and it is better that it does not. Support produces stability and SEO produces rankings; combined in one contract, neither can be evaluated.

Can I support the site myself?

If you have the time and the interest, yes. The minimum is three tasks: regular updates, external backups and a test restore. The hard part is discipline rather than technical knowledge.

What should I receive if I change providers?

WordPress admin access, hosting access, ownership of the domain, the latest full backup and a list of the third party services connected to the site. If any of those is withheld, the handover stops.